Friday, 31 August 2012

Keller’s on the case: From solving mysteries to writing them

Today’s guest blog is
by Julia Kellerthe author ofA Killing in the Hills, a crime novel published by Headline. The first in a series of books to feature
prosecuting attorney Bell Elkins who campaigns against the illegal trading of
prescription drugs which is prevalent in rural America. The series is set in the fictional town of
Acker’s Gap West Virginia. In 2005 she
won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing whilst a journalist with the Chicago
Tribune.

Had you chanced
to be bedevilled by a daunting mystery or flummoxed by the loss of a favourite
object, and had you lived in Huntington, West Virginia, some years ago, you would
have done yourself a considerable favour by stopping in at my house.For I ran a detective agency.Moreover, despite the fact that I was in
fourth grade, it was an excellent one; we were clever, discreet, and
indefatigable.

Armed with a
notebook, a well-sharpened pencil, and a couple of shiny bicycles—on the off
chance that a particular case required travel—we offered our services at a fee
that could fit most budgets. Twenty-five
cents gained you my full attention, as well as that of my associate, my six-year-old
sister Lisa. Lost dogs, missing caps,
misplaced eyeglasses: Name your mystery and we hastened to solve it.

I now write crime
fiction. And I can draw a line from my early
career as the owner-operator of a detective agency to my current profession, a
line that loops around a passionate love for comic book superheroes and their
crime-fighting ways and then makes a great sweeping curve around TV crime shows
such as “The Wire” and “The Closer,” before finally coming to
rest at “A Killing in the Hills” (Headline),
the first in my series of novels about Belfa Elkins, a short-tempered but tough
and effective prosecuting attorney in a small town in the Appalachian
Mountains.

I recall an
especially difficult case handled by my agency.
A client could not find the red leather leash for her dog. She was certain that she had left it on her
porch, but a check of the premises yielded nothing. The “Aha!” moment came when I heard the dull
roar of an electric mower, as a neighbour of hers finished trimming his lawn. My client’s lawn, I noticed, was beautifully
shorn; it was proof that her grass had recently been cut. I began to sift the soft blanket of cut grass
around the edges of the porch. Success! The leash had slipped off the porch and, when
the mower swept by, the cut grass had managed to obscure the leash beneath a
blanket of green.

What motivated
the creation of the Keller Detective Agency—and what accounts for the
popularity of crime fiction—is a certain earnest gallantry, a sense that the
world must be put right again, after being blurred and scrambled and turned
upside-down by perfidy, or sometimes simply by blind happenstance. The satisfaction of writing and reading crime
fiction is indistinguishable from the delights of running a detective agency. Young and old, we believe that lost leashes
were meant to be found, that two and two must equal four, that the universe
ought to be comprehensible. Because it
is not, heaven knows, always kind or just.
That universe should—after we have sifted through all the clues—finally
make sense to us, even if that sense seems fragile, shifting, and tentative.

And for that bit
of wisdom, I’ve consented to waive my usual twenty-five-cent fee.

More information
about Julia Keller and her work can be found on her website.